From dump to des res, thanks to a bit of targeting and local co-operation.The 40 on the tour were impressed. Shocked if you like.”They weren’t there simply as tourists; the hope was rather that they might return to their building societies and banks, law practices and financial institutions with a better knowledge of their community. Perhaps next time a candidate for a job turned out to be from that estate, they might give them a more sympathetic hearing than local prejudice tended to allow.That, plus a realisation that life need not be like it was in that particular corner of Bradford. Jovially warned not to talk too loudly in posh accents about what a dump this was, the party none the less found it hard to camouflage its arrival.

One elderly man, coming out of his front door with two snappy dogs on a lead, summed up the unexpected descent of a group of haves on the land of the have-nots when he stammered: “What the bloody hell are you lot doing here?”
The party was there at the suggestion of Common Purpose, a nationwide organisation whose aim is to encourage professionals halfway up the career ladder (“future leaders” in the jargon) to get involved in their communities. In Bradford, this year’s crop on the Common Purpose course were visiting a place which few could have visited before; a godforsaken corner of the town marooned on the wrong side of the ring-road, out of sight and mind, a place that surprised the visitors with its decay.”No, I’d never been here before,” said one participant “And yes, I was pretty surprised. Through this epitome of urban deprivation a group of some 40 people, professionals in suits wearing name badges on their lapels, picked their way, stepping lightly to ensure they didn’t dirty their office shoes. A few ancient electrical appliances stood rotting, and a couple of gutted trucks rested on bricks.

In fact there wasn’t much of a road – the tarmac had been torn up by resident entrepreneurs, to be sold, someone said, as hard-core. The gardens of the tumbledown 1950s semis had lost all their fences (used as firewood ages ago, apparently) and had merged into the broken road in a stew of mud. How it had died was unclear, but it was unlikely to have been run over Down this cul-de-sac there weren’t any cars. Or there is the supply-and-demand angle: New Yorkers have more sex than men anywhere else.. Just on the corner of a cul-de-sac in the Holmefield estate in Bradford, as if placed there by the BBC central props department to give a visual clue about what kind of place this was, lay a dead cat.

That is more than 50 per cent higher than the measly 72.7 million registered by men living in Los Angeles.Much more important, says Dr Fisch, is to understand the main bodies of research that have suggested worldwide declines in sperm counts were misleading because they compared new data gathered in Europe and the Third World with earlier results from New York, where the counts have always been high. Among the theories: LA guys spend too much time in hot tubs (not good for the testicles), tight shorts (likewise) and in fitness gyms. “Take New York out of those studies, and there is no decline,” he said yesterday.Non-scientific speculation about sperm-heavy New Yorkers is already under way. Its author, Dr Harry Fisch of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, found a “slight but significant increase”.There may be no explaining – scientifically anyway – the elevated sperm counts of New York men, who boast 131.4 million sperm per millilitre of semen. Two subsequent studies, in Belgium and France, drew similar conclusions, and raised concern over the quality of sperm.The new findings, which are certain to provoke furious debate in the medical fraternity, are detailed in three reports in this month’s issue of the US journal, Fertility and Sterility.One study analysed the semen of 1,283 men who made deposits to sperm banks in three cities – Los Angeles, New York and Roseville, Minnesota – from 1970 to 1994. There is also intriguing evidence that residents of New York City consistently demonstrate far higher sperm counts than men in other US cities.
While the revelation hands welcome machismo rights to all Big Apple males, it is also the basis for another important conclusion; that previous studies suggesting falling sperm counts were grievously flawed because they failed to take such geographical variations into account.A Danish scientist first alerted the world to the possibility of declining sperm counts in 1992, showing that sperm counts among 15,000 men in 20 countries had dropped by almost half in 50 years. Claims that men are suffering from a mysterious decline in their sperm counts that could eventually imperil the future of the human race are being dramatically challenged by scientists in the United States.